Transmission Difficulties

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917, that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that Boas was doing with Tate’s stories? It is this question that Ralph Maud sets out to address in Transmission Difficulties.

Boas’s original misrepresentations of the more than 2,000 pages of material he received from Henry Tate have been denied by the ethnographic establishment for more than eighty years. His distortion of Tate’s stories has been rationalized, to date, as “cultural relativism”—any loss of Tate’s original material in this ethnographic “collaboration” between Native informant and European scientist was “unavoidable,” due to the presumably equal “cultural differences” between them. This, Maud argues convincingly, is not the case at all. The fact that Boas paid Tate for his stories by the page, and furthermore instructed Tate specifically on what stories, and even on what kinds of stories he was to gather and submit, created a profoundly unequal relationship between these two men, which resulted in an inevitable and pre-determined “authentication” of the Native material by the European ethnographer.

Transmission Difficulties unfolds like a gripping, real-life mystery story. It leaves the reader with a whole new vision of what the relation between European colonials and Aboriginal inhabitants in the Americas might have been, and still might be.

AUTHOR

Ralph Maud

Ralph Maud (1928–2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Paciﬁc Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereﬀ (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories — a collection of Henry W. Tate’s stories in Tate’s original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian work, published as an article: “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology” in American Ethnologist. Maud’s subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Reviews

“Ralph Maud’s book provides a valid enough critique of inadequate methodology and demonstrates a sincere will to redeem work begun by Boas. Maud certainly presents his own editing work with modesty, and—most importantly—invites others to join in an overdue discovery of Henry Tate.” – David Brundage, Canadian Literature